Haiti mission strengthens teen’s resolve to be doctor

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** ADVANCE FOR USE TUESDAY, SEPT. 7, AND THEREAFTER ** In this Monday, July 5, 2010 picture, Bazelais Suy shakes hands with a police officer as he arrives in Port-au-Prince, Haiti at the Toussaint Louverture airport. Suy is a student activist whose spine was crushed when a university building collapsed in Haiti's catastrophic earthquake last January. He was airlifted to Chicago for six months of intensive rehabilitation and returned to Haiti with hopes of helping rebuild the country. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

The stench was so overpowering that sometimes Joe Shattuck thinks he can still smell the rotting human flesh, though it has been weeks since he left Haiti.

Joe, 17, recently accompanied his father, Frankfort business owner John Shattuck, on a humanitarian mission to the earthquake-ravaged country.

Joe’s only preparation for the task of wrapping bodies and covering them with burial palls was a dash of peppermint beneath his nose to mask the smell and a mental exercise in remaining detached.

“I just concentrated on the work,” he says. “Your emotions hit you later. It’s sad to see so many people dying from lack of care.”

The trip made Joe even more resolved to become a doctor.

“It makes me more appreciative of what we have in this country, of all that we take for granted,” said Joe, who survived a rare and deadly leukemia as a small child.

The father and son traveled to Haiti with burial palls and other materials supplied by Chicago area donors.

At the morgue where the Shattucks worked, the bodies were not embalmed and were dressed in the clothes in which the people had died.

Before the bodies were zipped into bags, the palls, along with a rosary, were placed over them. Then a blessing was said.

Shattuck, vice chairman of the nonprofit Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos International (Friends of the Orphans), said he could take 40 minutes at a time; Joe worked for hours.

“Joe surprised me,” John said. “He was amazing. He outlasted me.”

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